3 Eyes and 7 Legs

My daughter turned 9 in January and we decided to finally get her a kitten. Our last cat passed away two years ago this past Christmas and it was feeling like time to have a pet again. My kitty boyfriend Quarter was filling my pet need void for a while two summers ago but we barely saw him in the last year. I’m hoping that someone decided to finally take him in but I still fear the worst. He was special and I was heartbroken when I couldn’t get Mr Awesome to agree to make him ours.

When we decided to get a kitten for Piper we started searching petfinders for needy kitties in our area. We were happy when we found this wonderful shelter nearby. Going through the listings we saw Ponyo.

Our first look at Ponyo the cat

We loved her name (because we loved the movie) and her little one-eyed face. She was found in the middle of the road with an infection in her right eye that was so bad she almost lost it. Ponyo was shy but somehow Mr Awesome managed to bond with her. While at the shelter we were led to the kitten room where we met Ponyo and about 10 other adorable kittens of varying ages. My daughter focused in on only one of them. A tiny grey kitten who was dragging her front leg around as she moved around the room.

Bonnie the day we met

We were told that her name was Bonnie and she had an even more harrowing story. Bonnie was found in the woods. She was the sole survivor of her litter who had been attacked by an animal. A lady heard her crying and brought her to the shelter. Her lower lip was detached from her jaw and she didn’t put any weight on her front right paw. The doctor fixed her lip and eventually determined that they wanted to amputate her leg because it had extensive nerve damage. They fear it would eventually become infected or lose circulation and it’s better to remove it now.

We never intended to bring home two kittens but somehow it just happened. We had to wait until after the New Year to bring them home since we were going away for the holiday and Bonnie wasn’t going to be fully recovered until then.

We brought home Ponyo home first in early January and she seemed to settle in very quickly. She was a cuddly sweet girl right from the start. Three weeks later Bonnie was deemed ready to come home too but now I question that decision. She was just getting off the heavy antibiotics she was on right after surgery and it was suggested we put a “little newspaper” around the litterbox because it could “be a little messy”. A little messy would not be the words I would have chosen to describe the stinking molten lava I saw coming out of her butt that first time. Yum! The diarrhea combined with her lack of balance made her frquent trips to the litterbox fun for the entire family. Ponyo didn’t know what to make of Bonnie and seemed genuinely pissed at us for bringing the interloper in. We really questioned if we had done the right thing. Bonnie was sweet and all but it was difficult to deal with her unsanitary condition and her effect on our Ponyo. Of course we went about it all totally wrong and didn’t separate them from the beginning but I know better now.

We had Bonnie treated for coccidia which seemed to improve her poop somewhat and switched around her food which seems to be helping as well. Her poop still isn’t exactly right but at least she’s learned to keep it off her most of the time.

We love her now and even though Mr Awesome likes to remind me that the shelter will take her back no questions asked for the rest of her life don’t see her doing that. She’s got a great spirit and doesn’t seem to be held back by only having 3 legs at all. Ponyo loves her now too and they love to chase each other all over the place. Bonnie can jump like any other cat and is faster than Ponyo at high speeds. Her walking gait is a little clunky but she makes it work. Piper is so proud of her little tripod and I like that we gave two special needs kitties a good home. They want and give as much love as anyone else. I had forgotten what joy a pet brings to your life. I missed that and think I really need it in my life.

Our family feels complete now.

Sick Day

My daughter has been fighting a stomach ache all week and we’re staying home today so I can take her to the doctor. I fear it will be one of those visits where we get sent home not knowing anything more than when we arrived. I picked her up early from school yesterday. We wanted her to try to make it through a day of school (she stayed home Monday) but didn’t get very far. I have been very busy at work so I’m getting a little anxious to get back to my desk. I’ve been getting many more opportunities for writing at my job which is good but it has definitely cut into my writing energy here. There have been some things that have been on my mind.

My brother’s 50th birthday passed in December. His birthday has been hard because it comes just weeks after the anniversary of his death. This year was different and was very sad for me. My divisional manager also celebrated his 50th birthday in the first week of December. He traveled to Europe to celebrate and his managers toasted him at a meeting the following week. I couldn’t help thinking about all the choices that had been made in Mike’s life that led him down his path. Some of the choices he was responsible for but many of them were beyond his control.

We were at my parent’s house for New Year’s and my Mom showed me the christmas card she got from my Dad. He wrote her a poem and signed it “Tony and Michael”. This made me see red but I realize it is a good illustration of how truly delusional he is. If he thinks that he speaks for my brother in any way, especially now, that is just sick. I also think that if Mike has taken the small favored spot in my Dad’s brain then I’m truly doomed with him. I should give up right now because there is no way I can ever compete with his fantasy. Love for the Giants football team was one thing that my father and brother could agree on in life. I didn’t call my Dad after they won on Sunday, in fact I haven’t spoken to them at all this week. I guess that I should have called but I figured that my Dad had Mike there watching the game with him so he doesn’t need to hear from me anyway.

Same Time Next Next Year

I just got a bill in the mail for $145 from our Pediatrician for my daughter’s last well visit. She turned 8 in January and we took her to the doctor as we always do for her annual checkup. I was wondering why the bill was so high I thought that they hadn’t applied our insurance or something. My husband had taken her to this visit and the office was just changing over their computer system so there was a lot of confusion when they checked in. I called the office and they said that my claim had been denied by our provider United Healthcare because our benefit had been exhausted. I called United Healthcare right away because I knew for a fact that this year’s visit was exactly one year from last year’s visit. After bypassing the robotic system — I despise talking to robots on the telephone, they need to hire some Cylons so I can’t tell that they’re robots — I had to go through several customer service humans to get my answer as to why my claim was denied. My company, the global one who shall not be named, has decided to only cover well visits every other year for children aged 7 and up. WTF?

Needless to say this news started my blood boiling. The next day I told my manager about it and he referred me to our HR representative. She sent me a copy of our Health Plan and I saw it there myself. I had never noticed this before. That shows you how carefully I reviewed all that stuff. I wonder if this is a policy that is often found in other healthcare plans or is this just my company’s, the global one who shall not be named, policy? How about you Internets, is this part of your employer’s benefits plan as well?

Frankly I think it is terrible. If you look at all the medical services that are not covered under the plan, i.e., plastic surgery, private duty nursing, hearing aid repairs, various infertility services, etc., you can logically see why they would not be covered. But a routine physical examination of an 8, 10, 12 . . . year old child is not covered? That makes absolutely no sense to me at all. This is preventative care for a child not some fancy elective medical service?!! Grrrrrrrrrrrr! My HR rep said that they do have an appeals process which I guess I could try to slough through but that is not the point. I believe that they should cover routine preventive care for everyone, every year no matter what age. Most adults don’t get to the doctor every year anyway. At a minimum they should cover yearly exams for kids to age 18! Meanwhile my company, the global one who shall not be named encourages everyone enrolled in their health insurance plans to fill out these healthcare assessments every year by giving you a $100 Visa® gift cards. You can also earn another $100 Visa® gift card by completing a Weight Watchers or defined exercise program. This is a terrific benefit and I happily received my $200 in essentially free money last year but if it is at the expense of paying for my child to see a doctor for a physical every year, I just don’t know.

1991

While reading Half in Love by Linda Gray Sexton I found myself remembering how I used to write poetry. Lots of poetry. I barely do anymore. It’s almost like that was a different person, that poetry writing girl. Looking through an old notebook I found this. It’s an early draft of something I never finished. I read it now and think that it’s a bit corny in parts but I like it. I thought that it was an interesting snapshot of me almost exactly 20 years ago.

Untitled – 2/26/91

I have lived far from the water for too long. I wish to be touched by the ocean. Its cold green smile forcing my lips to a blue grin of muscles gently aching. To smell the wind in my skin, amidst the stony salted patterns, like tracks of millipedes. My eyes will ignore the lesser colors, seduced by electric fish scales, (sea greens) and rich sky.

I wish to be slapped by waves, awoken from my slumberous thoughts and their dry results. My dry brain creaks in its casing. Fossil ideas stick in my throat. How I thirst for salt water, our parent fluid. I suck on pieces of shell, its smooth skin smooth on my tongue. Searching for the taste. The taste of God.

At one time, I wanted to breathe the water without help of gills, the ocean floor, unaware of silent light straining down to touch my face. I wanted to be dreaming coral, home for fishes, deep rooted, unmoving yet secretly alive. Buried underwater. My million fingers gripping, gripping the sand.

Standing on the beach, waves bury my feet under sand. The surface like the glistening skin of a seamless shark, and I am planted upon her back. We are feeding and I have yet to have my fill. Beaten by a wave, I’m thrown upon the beach. Tasting the sand in my mouth, in my hair, in my eyes, in my crotch. Its roughness is so lovely. And I turn to crawl back into the tide again.

Damaged Goods

I just finished reading Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton. Linda is the oldest daughter of Poet Anne Sexton who suffered from chronic undiagnosed mental illness and attempted suicide many times throughout Linda’s childhood. She finally succeeded and killed herself when Linda was 21 and a senior at Harvard. Linda’s lifelong struggle with depression, alcoholism, medications and 2 serious suicide attempts is vividly retold in the book. Despite being continually abandoned emotionally and physically by her mother, Linda is slowly drawn into repeating the very same behavior with her own children and family. While she knows first hand the pain that suicide leaves with those left behind she cannot resist the desire to reconnect with her mother even if it means her own destruction. The book opens with Linda’s first serious suicide attempt 6 months before she would turn 45. This is significant because her mother’s suicide was only 1 month before her 45th birthday. This can’t help but make me reflect on my upcoming 45th birthday this year and my brother Mike’s suicide less than 1 month before his 46th birthday. In a little over 1 year’s time I will be older than my big brother and time will continue on like that for the rest of my life. Linda’s detailed descriptions of her life at her lowest points also resonated strongly with me. Any reader will recognize the personal human pain she feels and lays out so unselfconsciously whether they are dealing with a depressed loved one or if they’ve traveled a similar path themselves. The book gives an eloquent voice to those who most need to be heard but because of their situations cannot get the words out.

Now I find myself wondering what kind of emotional legacy my brother and I received from our own mother. When my daughter was born my dad compulsively evaluated and criticized every single choice we made with her. I knew enough to ignore his advice even if it meant arguing over every single one. I now realize that he probably did the very same thing with my mother when my brother was born. As a new mother in a relatively new country I’m sure she had all the normal insecurities in her ability to care for her infant son. I have no doubt that my father was unable to let her find her way on her own. I can see him trying to control every single thing she did with the baby from the very start. She must’ve felt so inadequate when comparing herself to her professional Psychologist husband. Surely he knew what he was talking about! I can imagine how defenseless and alone she would have felt. Eventually my mom withdrew from the family and let my dad cast her as the enemy.  I was quite young when my dad started to tell us that it wouldn’t take much for my mother to become an alcoholic. I guess that this was to undermine our trust in her and scare me especially into wanting to be on his side. It was very important in my family to take sides. I was very aware that it was my father and I versus my brother and my mother in a lot of ways. How did this dynamic play out as we got older and my brother started getting into trouble all the time? My parents always fought about my brother. My dad would rage and blame my mother for Mike’s every fault. She loved Mike through it all but of course just having her love wasn’t enough for him in the end. It was damaged goods.

I guess the question now is not what emotional legacy will I pass onto my own daughter but whose?

 

Thank you to award-winning author Linda Gray Sexton for sponsoring this series, which is inspired by her memoir Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide.

I was selected for this sponsorship by Clever Girls Collective which endorses Blog With Integrity.

To learn more about Linda Gray Sexton and her writing, please visit her website.

The Endless Snowday

I don’t know if you’ve heard but we’ve been having kind of a snowy winter this year. I generally try to not complain about the weather because I feel that there really isn’t too much you can do about it but it’s getting harder to hold my tongue. My daughter has not had a full week of school without any snow days or delayed openings since before Christmas Vacation. I know that it hasn’t been that long but it kind of feels like an eternity. We’ve been making the best of it and have been taking full advantage of our local sledding hills as you can see from the video below. The music is Spike Jones’ Winter and it definitely sticks in your brain but in a good way. Enjoy! 

Grandpa

We journeyed to Skylandia this past weekend to belatedly celebrate the holiday and my daughter’s birthday with my parents. Thankfully my in-laws were able to come as well. I think my mother had a good time. She stayed up late everynight enjoying the company. I did all the cooking and planning. I have been talking and thinking about this pot roast I wanted to make for weeks now. We finally get there on Thursday and I pull my 4lb roast out of the cooler and my dad turns to me and says, “oh, she’s not allowed to eat meat.” We later clarified that she is supposed to eat only lean meats and fish but it is not like she can’t have a little bit on a special occasion. I wish that he had told me earlier. I would have obviously made other plans but it was way too late to change it and she ate it (and enjoyed it) anyway.

Grandpa was in fine form for our visit. He is constantly underfoot in the kitchen. It’s like how I used to describe my dog Dylan. She was like a VISA card, she’s everywhere you want to be. He thinks that he is helping you but when someone tries to clean everything as soon as you set it down it is just annoying. I don’t know how my mother has done it all these years. He was pissing me off and I was obviously pissing him off. I could hear him complaining to my mother in the middle of the night on Saturday. I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying on the other side of the wall but I could recognize the tone and the anger in his voice. It’s exactly what he used to sound like when he would talk about my brother.

The highpoint of the weekend is when he told my mother-in-law that Piper is beautiful except when she smiles because her front teeth are too big. I remember him telling me not too smile in pictures because of my teeth when I was a child. I didn’t say anything to him because I didn’t want her to overhear any of it. I’m not sure what to do because he’s bound to tell her sometime. He just can’t keep those little bon mots to himself. You can’t unring that bell.

In the immortal words of Mr Awesome, what a douchebag.

Happy Blog Year!

Wow, apparently I’m on fire. Thanks to you all!!!!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 99 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 226 posts. There were 138 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 121mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was May 2nd with 69 views. The most popular post that day was Celebrity Crush – Anthony Bourdain.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were networkedblogs.com, healthfitnesstherapy.com, digg.com, dating-online2u.blogspot.com, and slashingtongue.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for fanny doodle, fanny doodle game, fanny doodle zoom, feminine christian attire, and fanny doodles.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Celebrity Crush – Anthony Bourdain May 2010
2 comments

2

About me April 2010
1 comment

3

Me yesterday June 2010

4

Fanny Doodle loves the Tooth Fairy but doesn’t like Santa Claus November 2009

5

So it begins . . . November 2010
2 comments

Dear Mike,

So this is Xmas, and what have you done?

I keep hearing John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over) playing everwhere. I remember sitting on the floor in your room on Skank Ave. I’m infront of your stereo listening to that song. You’re probably playing it to show me how much better it is than Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime. You’d always get sentimental during the holidays and you’d pull out your old singles and the Beatles’ Blue and Red albums and play them for me. This year is the 30th anniversary of Lennon’s death and it is hard for me to believe that it has been that long. I also can’t believe that someday it will be 30 (or even 10) years since you died. I don’t want the time between when you were alive and when you were not to ever stretch that far apart but I cannot make it stop. I was listening to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast the other day and they were talking about It’s a Wonderful Life. Linda Holmes said that she really loved that movie not only because it’s about a noble person who makes sacrifices and how those choices enrich all the people in their life. She loves it because it shows how those sacrifices come at a price to the person. Making hard choices is hard and life sucks a lot of the time.

I made Glenn wake me up in the middle of the night on Monday so we could go outside and look at the lunar eclipse. It wasn’t as big as I hoped it would be but it was very cool looking. I thought it looked kind of like a smooth orangey cookie. Or maybe that was the oven talking. We just got our new oven installed on Monday and I started baking as soon as I got home from work. I had you partly in mind when I asked Glenn to get me up. I don’t know if you had ever seen an eclipse or not so I’m saving that memory for you Mike. I know that there will be more “things” I’ll be saving for you along the way. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to give them to you but maybe I already have.

Merry Christmas.

Love,

M

Sea Monkeys and Other Disappointments

My daughter told me about a brine shrimp ecosystem she had seen on a shopping trip with Mr Awesome and it got me thinking about Sea Monkeys. I told her how I saw the Sea Monkey ads in the back of comic books and begged my mother to let me send away for them. Once they arrived I was very disappointed to see that they weren’t even remotely like the happy little creatures in the Sea Monkeys ads. They couldn’t “appear” to do tricks. The only way they’d dance to the beat of music is if you put their milk glass on top of the speaker and turned the dial all the way up. They didn’t have faces or even arms and legs. They were just brine shrimp or Artemia. They weren’t adorable, in fact they looked like swimming bugs. I just noticed the line of fine print at the bottom of the page “Caricatures shown not intended to depict Artemia”. Well, what were they supposed to be depicting then? I never saw that before. Maybe it was there all the time and I just blocked it out. I told her that these kinds of ads wouldn’t be allowed these days. But don’t worry kids today learn their cynicism in other ways. She and I laughed reading the ad copy. I hope that you enjoy it as well. Here is a link to a lot more ads if you’re feeling nostalgic.

While looking up the Sea Monkeys ad we also found the one for the “Gag Gifts”. I love how the Disguise Kit is described as “A Riot of Fun for Everyone!” I think my favorite is the “Radio Time ‘Bomb’. Looks like a transistor radio but can be set from 10 seconds to 10 minutes to explode – harmlessly, but really shocks and surprises. Plant and watch the fun.”

Wow, where can I get one?

I hope that this holiday season brings you everything you hope for!